China may be far away but Foxconn is on our doorstep

Drawing on support from permissive governments,
multinational manufacturer Foxconn has set up shop in Central Europe. Yet the
transitory nature of the many migrant workers employed in these factories will have serious consequences for the future of labour in Europe.

The best dormitory in town
bears the evocative name of Hotel Harmony and
houses several hundred migrant workers recruited almost exclusively by Xawax, one
of the country’s 1,300 or so recruitment agencies. The Express People agency,
on the other hand, puts its workers up in a third-rate bed and breakfast,
the Veselka, a stone’s throw
from the railway station.

In both dormitories there
are four beds in each room, but while the people staying in the Hotel Harmony have a kitchenette and
an en-suite bathroom per room, the others have to make do with a run-down
kitchen, two foul-smelling bathrooms and a dozen showers for almost 80 people.
In the Veselka the toilets
are often blocked and there are no locks on the doors. Somebody has written a
couple of things on the walls here. The first is an ironic exchange – Fuck Foxconn – I’m looking for a job
with Foxconn, while the second is less inventive – Fuck Express People.

Both groups work 12-hour
shifts in the Foxconn factory. We’re not in China but in Pardubice, 100
kilometres from Prague, where the company bought a factory at the beginning of
the 21st century. The city of Kutna Hora, a few dozen kilometres further away,
has been home to another factory for about five years and, if you carry on
as far south as Nitra, across the border with Slovakia, you will find
Foxconn’s third and final base in the European Union.Foxconn manufactures computers,
laptops, servers and printer cartridges in Pardubice and Kutna Hora for
Hewlett-Packard, while Sony’s orders for flat-screen TVs keep the production
lines busy in the Nitra factory.

There is, of course, no
comparison in numerical terms with the Chinese factories: fewer than 10,000
people are either directly or indirectly employed here. Nevertheless, the
practices employed in the two Czech factories owned by the Taiwanese
multinational, the largest electronic manufacturing firm in the
world, reveal new frontiers in labour organisation and management for the
European employment system.The
Czech Republic is a kind of “special export zone” within which multinationals
can experiment with various ways of managing a workforce with average European
salaries. A proper state machine implemented by various Eastern European
countries in order to attract foreign investment supports the efforts of the
manufacturing industry.

Transnational labour flows

In the two factories the
workforce, two-thirds male, operates within departments strictly subdivided
according to the product and, when necessary, the brand. This system of
separation responds to various needs: until a few years ago the Kutna Hora
factory made products for Apple, but when the workers started getting together
to demand better working conditions, the division was closed. “They laid off 29
people every ten months - if the number reached 30, the dismissals had to be
authorised by the trade union and the local authorities. Those who agreed
to leave the union carried on working,” explains Gabriel, one of the 300 or so
people that were sacked.

In the Czech factories,
alongside the local workers and their Slovakian counterparts, who usually
perform supervisory and management roles in the factories, we find migrants
from various countries: Bulgaria, Mongolia, Romania, Poland, Ukraine,
Vietnam. The historic links between these former socialist countries form
a foundation for these migratory flows, which are often managed by recruitment
agencies with international branches. For the European migrants, including the
Ukrainians, mobility is usually cheap, as it is for the Mongolians, who
emigrate via networks of friends and relatives.

English and Chinese
managers are in charge of this multinational workforce, which is usually
employed to perform repetitive tasks lasting 40-60 seconds. It is generic
work, easily replaceable.“They
only want people aged between 20 and 35 because the work is very fast,”
explains Madalena, a young Romanian who had already worked in Slovakia and
Spain before coming here. Madalena comes from Tulcea in the Danube Delta, where
she used to work for an Italian textile firm. “I’m better off with Foxconn than
back in Romania. I earn 400-500 euros per month and I sleep in this room, which
is paid for by the agency, with my husband.”

Madalena, like many
others, is part of the large pool of workers experiencing a new freedom of
labor movement within Europe.For
the moment this experience does not seem to be making workers see themselves as
all belonging to the same social class; instead a belief is growing that you
need to seize opportunities to work in different countries. Petre, a
30-year-old Romanian, alternates between jobs abroad and in his native country.
“I’ve worked in Hungary as a bricklayer, in Slovakia in the TPCA factory (a
joint venture between Toyota, Peugeot and Citroen), I’ve done agricultural work
in Italy and now I’ve come here. When I arrived in Imola in September 2011, the
hourly wage was 6 euros. By March 2012 it had gone down to 3.50 euros, so I
decided to go back to Romania. Then I heard that an agency was looking for
people to work for Foxconn, so I came here.”

The nationalities of the
immigrants working for Foxconn reflect the general situation in the Czech
Republic, where in 2011 they made up 5.4 percent of the employed population,
around 310,000 people. The biggest groups are Slovakians (114,000), Ukrainians
(70,000), Vietnamese (34,000), Poles (21,000), Bulgarians (8,000) and Romanians
(7,000). There were over 13,000 Mongolians in 2008, but this figure has dropped
to 3,300. The number of Ukrainians and Vietnamese has also fallen because of the
new migration policy aimed at citizens of non-EU countries and Bulgaria and
Romania’s joining the EU.

It is no coincidence that Romania
and Bulgaria have both experienced a net increase in emigration to the Czech
Republic since 2008. In the areas around both Pardubice and Kutna Hora the
number of residence permits increased steadily between 2001 and 2008 and has
subsequently decreased at a similar rate. In 2001 there were 621 non-EU
immigrants in the two cities, rising to 9,457 in 2008 but falling to just 1,937
in 2011. Workers from within the EU can now circulate without any specific
restrictions, but those from outside the EU need to renew their residence
permits every six months at a cost of 100 euros. In addition, a regulation
which came into force in January 2012 prevents companies from hiring non-EU
workers through recruitment agencies. In order to circumvent this regulation,
Foxconn subcontracts certain departments directly to the agencies, which find
themselves with new responsibilities as employers, especially when a labour
inspector turns up at the factory.

By relying on recruitment
agencies, Foxconn is guaranteed considerable flexibility.During peak periods, in the run-up
to Christmas when shops in the west are full of customers looking for the
latest technological gadget, around 4,500 people are usually working in
Pardubice and 2,500 in Kutna Hora. In both cases, 40 percent of these are temporary
workers, mostly migrants, some of whom will soon be going back home or having
to look for another job. The workers who have a contract with an agency
cannot, apart from exceptional cases, be hired by Foxconn straightaway, but
they need to wait at least six months before starting work. Some agencies do
defraud their workers, but these are an exception to the rule.

A workforce united?

And so there is a
multinational workforce in the factories which, for the moment, doesn’t seem to
have bonded, and often remains divided along ethnic lines. On the other hand,
the company’s focus on the idea of a community seems crucial, both for
facilitating the cooperation of a workforce that often cannot speak the local
language and, especially, for monitoring and managing behaviour in the workplace
through a chain of intermediaries: production line leaders, department heads,
interpreters and agency employees. Direct and indirect workers coexist,
therefore, without interacting much because of both linguistic problems
and mutual false perceptions by each group about the other. Both temporary and
direct workers complain that the members of the other group are allowed to work
overtime and therefore earn more.

Working hours vary
according to the daily needs of the company.Direct
workers usually work eight-hour shifts for around 40 hours per week, but
temporary workers always work 12-hour shifts, despite rarely working
five days per week. “I work on average 165 hours per month. I usually work
three days a week, sometimes four, for twelve hours a day. That’s not many hours
per week, I’d like to work more,” says a Bulgarian worker. One of the key
aspects of the Foxconn system is its unquestionable power in managing a
workforce in a constant state of flux, as a Polish worker explains. “Last month
I only worked 51 hours and I made 3,000 Koruna (120 euros). I went to the
factory every morning to see if there was work, but they said that there was
nothing for me. There were a few hundred of us, but the boss only called about
ten people so the rest of us just went back to our dormitory.”

As well as this
distinction in terms of working hours there’s also a distinction in terms of wages:
Foxconn employees are paid about 3.50 euros per hour and earn 600-700 euros per
month, but the temporary workers have to make do with 2.50 Euros per hour and a
monthly pay packet of 400-500 euros. It’s true that Foxconn pays out 6 or so euros
per hour to the recruitment agencies, but, as well as paying the workers, the
agencies have to cover their transport and accommodation. The recruitment
agencies are in fact an essential element in managing both the productive and
the reproductive aspects of the system.

Migrants with a good
understanding of the Czech language work for the agencies to monitor employee
performance within the factories, while others focus on the dynamics of
everyday life, right down to the dormitories. “At least once a month somebody
comes to check that no extra people are sleeping here. They have keys to the
rooms and they go in when we’re not there,” Alina tells us. These dormitories, often
distinguished by nationality, house temporary migrant workers at the expense of
the agency, which deducts around 150 euros from their wage packets. The few
workers who choose to look for independent accommodation can use the 150 euros,
but rents in town are usually three times higher.

The long shifts and
frenzied production activity that the factory sometimes experiences leads to a
high turnover of workers.A
trade union representative explains, “The main problem for the union is the
turnover of both migrant and Czech workers because the work is very repetitive
and quick. The annual turnover is around 20 percent, with at least 30 people
being hired every month.” In actual fact the turnover is difficult to
calculate: the number of workers is closely linked to the company’s
manufacturing needs and so temporary workers can be sent home when the amount
of work drops. “In mid-August they sent 300 Romanians home because there was no
more work,” Marius tells us.

The role of the union
remains marginal, not only because of the low levels of membership– 250-300 in Pardubice and fewer
than 100 in Kutna Hora – but particularly because it is only concerned
with core employees. “We don’t have access to the migrant workers, not least
because they don’t speak Czech... we don’t deal with residence permits because
one of Foxconn’s workers is in charge of these bureaucratic procedures.” And
yet the union’s office, on the ground floor of one of Foxconn’s buildings, is
next door to the major recruitment agency, Xawax. It’s no coincidence,
perhaps, that the temporary workers’ complaints are dealt with almost
exclusively by NGOs set up to support the migrants. This exclusion of
temporary migrant workers from union representation makes the future role of
the unions uncertainsince, as
a recently sacked ex-employee explains to us, “In the end there were only
temporary workers on the production line.” The vulnerability of migrant
workers as they replace organized labour is symptomatic of a trend all of
Europe must watch out for.

About the authors

Rutvica Andrijasevic works at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Agency, Migration and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking and has published widely on the impact of migration on labour relations and citizenship in Europe. Her most recent project investigates the raise of China and its impact on work and employment relations in Europe. Rutvica is a member of the editorial collective Feminist Review and an editorial board member of the Anti-Trafficking Review.

Devi Sacchetto works at the Department of Sociology, University of Padua and is the author of Fabbriche Galleggianti. Solitudine e sfruttamento dei nuovi marinai (Jaca Book 2009).

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